Comments inline.

On 26-Jan-2014, at 8:35 am, Nux! <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 26.01.2014 00:39, John Mancuso wrote:
>> So, I am planning on setting up a brand new cloud infrastructure
>> using Cloudstack 4.2 on RHEL6. Cloudstack is hypervisor agnostic- I
>> got that... However there are some differences and features that are
>> available on XenServer that are not available on KVM. This is from a
>> Citrix salesperson:
>> "Here is some feedback on the following benefits of using Citrix
>> XenServer over KVM:
>>  1.  Recurring Volume Snapshots with delta - Citrix XenServer is the
>> only hypervisor where recurring snapshots will be deltas (in other
>> hypervisors every volume snapshot is full) - this provides significant
>> space savings on secondary storage
>>  2.  VM snapshots (taking a snapshot of a VM volumes including
>> memory state - not possible with KVM which supports only volume
>> snapshots)
>>  3.  Live Storage Migration is only possible on Citrix XenServer
>> (not supported on KVM)
>>  4.  Live CPU and Memory Scaling for running instances (not supported on 
>> KVM)"
>> On the Redhat side they have made it very clear that while Xen is
>> still available, KVM is the hypervisor technology they are pushing &
>> supporting going forward.
>> On the Apache/Citrix side, I get the feeling that from a QA
>> perspective CloudStack (and CloudPlatform) is based and tested on
>> XenServer and would be preferable in a stable & reliable  Production
>> environment.
>
> Hello,
>
> You are mostly correct, those points seem valid and right now Xenserver is 
> the better supported hypervisor, it is quite mature and with loads of nice 
> features. I'm seriously considering it myself.
>
> Having said that, many clouds deployed nowadays are on KVM; yes it is missing 
> some features but it has a huge user base, it's very stable and the 
> performance is great; for me the killer feature is that I got a "real" OS as 
> hypervisor, an OS that I have used extensively and am quite familiar with, 
> for which we have deployment and monitoring infra in place etc etc. 
> Additionally, if you want to use more exotic stuff, such as GlusterFS, Ceph 
> or whatever crazy thing (CLVM over multiple mpath devices?) can run in 
> RHEL/CentOS proper KVM is again the best choice. If you want VXLAN you are 
> again limited to KVM afaik.
>
> So it kind of depends on your needs, luckily there are good quality options 
> to satisfy most of them.

What I personally find most relevant for choosing a hypervisor is guest OS
support. Not all hypervisors are created equal when it comes to supporting
a wide mix of operating systems.

Given that XenServer and KVM are both open source, I would recommend running
both. It gives you OS flexibility and spreads risks.

If you can afford, add VMware also. Enterprises love VMware.

Regards.

--
@shankerbalan

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